Photo: rafapress (AP)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s quest for Google reached a new milestone this week after the company announced that its AI-powered Bing search engine surpassed 100 million daily active users.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and chief consumer marketing officer, revealed Bing’s statistics in a blog post on Wednesday. Specifically, Mehdi pointed out that a third of the active users of Bing Preview, a limited early-bird release of the upcoming search engine, are new to Bing. He added that the company sees this as “validation” of its view that search needs to be reinvented, as well as proof of the desirability of offering search, answers, chat and creation in one place.
That doesn’t mean Microsoft can match Google, which already has more than 1 billion daily active users, but it’s a good start.
“This is a surprisingly remarkable number, and yet we are fully aware that we remain a small, low-single-digit stock player,” Mehdi said on the blog. “Nevertheless, it feels good to be part of the dance!”
The Microsoft executive went on to say that users are doing more searches on Bing, although he didn’t reveal specific numbers.
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Mehdi explained that there are two factors driving testing and adoption of Bing. One is its Microsoft Edge browser, which the company has been aggressively pushing at users with Windows updates and prompts to try and block people from downloading Google Chrome, The Verge reports. Microsoft plans to continue using Edge to power Bing in the future, Mehdi said.
“We expect that new features like searching and creating Bing in the Edge sidebar will drive further growth,” said the Microsoft executive.
Another factor driving the growth is Bing’s updated core web search ranking, Mehdi said, which has increased in relevance and quality thanks to the recent integration of OpenAI’s Prometheus model. At a press conference last month, Microsoft said Prometheus was “more powerful than ChatGPT,” the OpenAI chatbot that’s taken the world by storm.
As you might expect, users also come to Bing to chat with the infamous search engine. About a third of people use Bing Chat every day, with an average of three chats per session. Bing has registered more than 45 million chats since the preview began on February 7th.